ART GUIDE

Published: November 13, 1998

Here is a selective listing by critics of The Times of new or noteworthy art, design and photography exhibitions at New York City museums and art galleries this weekend. Addresses, unless otherwise noted, are in Manhattan. Most galleries are closed on Sundays and Mondays, but hours vary and should be checked by telephone. Gallery admission is free.

* denotes a highly recommended show.

Museums

* ''THE CEASELESS CENTURY: 300 YEARS OF 18TH-CENTURY COSTUME,'' Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Nov. 29). The theme of this scintillating show is the continuing impact on fashion of the elegant, extravagant 18th century, when aristocratic taste prevailed and luxury knew no bounds. Even in our minimalist modern age, a yearning for unabashed finery keeps breaking out, the show proposes, and it compares some magnificent examples of 18th-century style with 19th- and 20th-century counterparts. Echoes of the wasp waist, buttressed busts with deep decolletage, flaring hips and elaborate surface adornment beloved by the 18th century reappear in the 19th in a gown made by Elise, dressmaker to the Princess of Wales, for example, and in the 20th century in clothes by designers like Worth, Lanvin, Christian Lacroix, Hubert de Givenchy and Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. The examples, from the Met's collection, are strikingly handsome, and the presentation has panache. Hours: Fridays and Saturdays, 9:30 A.M. to 8:45 P.M.; Sundays, and Tuesdays through Thursdays, 9:30 A.M. to 5:15 P.M. Admission: $8; $4 for students and the elderly (Grace Glueck).

* ''DANCING AT THE LOUVRE: FAITH RINGGOLD'S FRENCH COLLECTION AND OTHER STORY QUILTS,'' New Museum of Contemporary Art, 583 Broadway, near Prince Street, SoHo, (212) 219-1222 (through Jan. 3). Faith Ringgold's ''story quilts'' are an enchanting blend of made-up tales and paintings, done on stitched canvas bordered with patchwork and -- except for recent ones -- written narrative. Works from her ''French Collection'' depict the fantastical adventures of a young black woman who was an artist in Paris in the 1920's; works from her ''American Collection'' deal in a visionary way with the lives of blacks in America. Also on view are earlier quilts, like ''Tar Beach'' (1988), which portrays a homey nighttime family picnic on a Harlem roof, with a daughter of the family flying over the George Washington Bridge in the background. A vivid sense of history, an audacious imagination and an irrepressible joie de vivre find voice in this lively show. Hours: Wednesdays and Sundays, noon to 6 P.M.; Thursdays through Saturdays, noon to 8 P.M. Admission: $5; $3 for artists, students and the elderly (Glueck).

* ''EDGAR DEGAS, PHOTOGRAPHER,'' Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue and 82d Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Jan. 3). Degas's art epitomizes what Yeats once called ''the fascination with what's difficult.'' This show, the first devoted to his photographs, includes nearly every photograph by him that survives, 40 in all, most from 1895 or thereabouts. Much of what we see, which at first may look straightforward, after a while reveals itself to be surprisingly complex and psychologically odd. Degas's sister died in 1895. His friend Evariste de Valernes was about to die. Perhaps this partly explains the pictures' frequently weird aura and ghostly imagery. It was precisely the nature of Degas's unorthodox genius to exploit photography, an emblem of the age of positivism, a mechanical process ostensibly reflecting the world exactly as it was, as a medium for pictures of such peculiar ineffability. Hours and admission: See above (Michael Kimmelman).

* ''WALKER EVANS: SIMPLE SECRETS,'' photographs from the collection of Marian and Benjamin A. Hill, International Center of Photography, 1130 Fifth Avenue, at 94th Street, (212) 768-4682 (through Nov. 29). The personal vision, technical perfection and headlong momentum of Evans's astoundingly prolific career are outlined in these 89 photographs, drawn from a private collection. They span Evans's early, nearly abstract images of New York architecture, influenced by the European avant-garde, to his Polaroids of graffiti made in his final years. In between are the great images from the mid-1930's, when Evans captured the psychic and physical reality of American life, while also making finely textured pictures whose every centimeter contributed to a visual whole as intense and as important to American art as any of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings. Hours: Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10 A.M. to 5 P.M.; Fridays, 10 A.M. to 8 P.M.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Admission: $6; $4, students and the elderly (Roberta Smith).

* ''FROM VAN EYCK TO BRUEGEL: EARLY NETHERLANDISH PAINTINGS AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART,'' Fifth Avenue at 82d Street, (212) 535-7710 (through Jan. 3). A patch of heaven has touched down in Manhattan. This dream of a show is exactly what it says it is: a display of more than a hundred 15th- and 16th-century Flemish paintings representing the bulk of the Met's impressive holdings. Long-hidden pieces have been pulled from storage, and familiar works have been brought together from throughout the museum. And the big news is also old news: the unrivaled genius of the Netherlandish artists and the inventive vitality of a culture that saw the natural and the supernatural worlds as mirror images. Hours and admission: See above (Holland Cotter).